Our objective in this paper is to compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. These functions are: Perm, Power-Sum, Bukin, Zero-Sum,...

The world market of crude oil has three well established benchmarks used for pricing of other crudes: West Texas Intermediate, Europe Brent and Dubai Fateh. The relevance of these are however declining, as the output of the benchmarks is decreasing, and as an increasing share of world crude...

Technologies that are used in different production processes of miscellaneous industries are known as cross-sectional technologies. The economic importance of these technologies normally is measured by economic benchmarks of the producing industry. However, the impact of these tech-nologies for...

In this paper we test a particular variant of the (Repulsive) Particle Swarm method on some rather difficult global optimization problems. A number of these problems are collected from the extant literature and a few of them are newly introduced. First, we introduce the Particle Swarm method of...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in...

The gross domestic product [GDP] is a fundamental economic indicator that is frequently used as a benchmark for local equity indices. The widespread appeal of this association is understandable because an equity index, especially if broad, could, like the GDP, also manifest the state of the...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function and to assess its performance (on a fairly large number of benchmark functions) vis-à-vis that of two other well-established and very...

The work constructs projections till 2030 for health care expenditures of Italian Regional Health Care Systems. Three different schemes of financing are hypothesised, with three different levels of solidarity between Regions. Financing is always supposed to cover the entire exigency of...

The influence of the CAPM theory on the financial theory of investment has increased with the development of passive management. Today, equity or fixed-income market portfolios can easily be defined using equity and fixed-income indexes. These indexes also play an important role in active...